A universal language will always be an unattainable dream
The comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, in his stage persona as the dim-witted interviewer Ali G, once asked Noam Chomsky if…
Short and sweet: Xstabeth, by David Keenan, reviewed
Aneliya, the Russian narrator of David Keenan’s enjoyably weird new novel, is worried about her dad. Tomasz’s modest music career…
False pretences: No-Signal Area, by Robert Perisic, reviewed
A journalist and poet based in Zagreb, Robert Perišic was in his early twenties when the socialist federal republic of…
Adam Mars-Jones’s protagonist has disarmingly low self-esteem: Box Hill reviewed
Short, fat and shy, the protagonist of Adam Mars-Jones’s latest novel doesn’t have much going for him; even his name…
Bawdy, it’s not — Strange Antics: A cultural history of seduction
Anyone reading Clement Knox’s history of seduction for salacious entertainment is likely to be disappointed: it contains no mention of…
Dave Eggers’s satire on Trump is somewhat heavy-handed: The Captain and the Glory reviewed
A feckless moron is appointed to the captaincy of a ship, despite having no nautical experience. The Captain has a…
Make it a new year’s resolution to be less active
As a boy Josh Cohen was passive, dopey and given to daydreaming. Now a practising psychoanalyst and a professor of…
Insomnia is key to my creativity
A genre of memoir currently in vogue involves entwining the author’s personal story with the cultural history of a given…
Rock and Roll is Life: The True Story of the Helium Kids by One Who Was There: A Novel, by D.J. Taylor, reviewed
The narrator-protagonist of D.J. Taylor’s new novel, a mild-mannered Oxford graduate named Nick Du Pont, has resisted the lure of…
The more outrageous sf fantasies give way to soft dystopias
Science fiction, as any enthusiast will tell you, is not just about gazing into the future but also about illuminating…
Crime and puzzlement in Tony White’s Oulipo-inspired novel
Tony White’s latest novel begins for all the world like a police procedural, following the delightfully named sleuth Rex King…
Folk-tale redux
Daniel and his big sister, Cathy, do not go to school. They live with their father, a gargantuan former prizefighter,…
Encounters with the nastiest people on the internet
It is almost a century since the Michelin brothers had the brainwave of supplementing their motorists’ guide with information about…
From Anthony Trollope to Meryl Streep: the theatre of politics on stage and screen
On 1 October 1950 the BBC broadcast a seemingly innocuous little play by Val Gielgud. A light-hearted and critically unremarkable…
